Archive for January, 2012

Sautéed the night before, this gently re-warmed turmeric-ginger red snapper fillet is combined with a half-plate of arugula, splintered celery bits, quartered grape tomatoes, and a melange of kiwi and orange pieces. It’s garnished with a scattering of pistachios and anise seeds, diced fresh ginger, parsley, paprika, and black pepper. Yummy and only about five minutes from first touch of the refrigerator door to ready to eat!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s new healthy eating aid, and experience how this simple, science-based, and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Do you marvel at the new internet-enabled social networks we all now have, or at least all now can have? And do you feel that your network, electronic or otherwise, reflects conscious decisions and preferences on your part?

A new study of modern-day hunter-gatherers by Harvard University and The University of California encourages a broader view on both points. It suggests: 1) that modern-day online social networks are more closely linked to earlier natural human social dynamics than we may realize, and 2) that our personal social networking preferences may be much more predictable than we believe.

The new study examines how human social networks are structured in our natural hunter-gatherer setting, focusing on how people with varying propensities for cooperation and individualism naturally mix and adjust to one another. This structuring of high and low cooperators is important, since in a predominantly cooperative species like Homo sapiens, incentives naturally exist for people who are more self-interested to take advantage of our generally cooperative social setting.

But highly individualistic “free-riders” must be naturally limited and made exceptional, since excessive or normalized individualism risks threatening essential cooperation and the entire society. This problem has been with us since the beginning of social life itself, and remains one of the most important social policy issues today.

A beautiful, slightly exotic, and optimally healthy salad meal made in about 15 minutes. It features a ginger-tarragon stir-fry of sliced pork, squid, scallops, shrimp, and red onion, along with a melange of mandarin orange and berries, and a half-plate of raw veggies – including mixed greens, splintered celery pieces, diced cucumber, and quartered grape tomatoes. This wonderful mix of natural foods and flavors is garnished with a scattering of pistachios, parsley, coriander, and black pepper. Enjoy – we did!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s new healthy eating campaign, and experience how this simple, science-based, and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Don’t let a fear of health risks from fried foods keep you from enjoying lightly-sautéed fish and other natural proteins. A just out University of Madrid study confirms what many of us have found through years of Natural Eating and healthy blood lipid profiles: oil quality matters as much or more than oil quantity!

This healthy Cajun fish salad meal follows HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines and scores a perfect 10 via our quick and easy OurPlate Meal Rating System. Made in minutes, the salad meal features sautéed white fish and red onion with herbs and a shot of cayenne pepper, a cool melange of diced kiwi and blueberries, and a half-plate of mixed greens with cut cherry tomatoes and diced cucumber. It’s all garnished with pistachios, parsley, paprika, coriander, a generous amount of anise, and just a bit of black pepper. Good!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s new healthy eating campaign, and experience how this simple, science-based, and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, we hope you will explore your other opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – through HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating model offers more than just important overall guidance on the best way to eat naturally and optimally.

You can also use the OurPlate model to quickly rate meals and meal options anytime. Rating meals with OurPlate is easy and powerful – quickly leading to new food and health awareness and improved eating choices.

With just a bit of practice, an OurPlate meal score can be created for any meal, following a few simple steps.

Rating Meals With OurPlate

HumanaNatura’s OurPlate Meal Rating Summary (Click to Enlarge)

To rate a meal using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate healthy eating model, follow these five simple steps:

#1: Points for vegetables – give a meal six points if it is at least half vegetables by volume (excluding grains and beans, foods that are not part of the OurPlate approach). If the amount of raw veggies is less than half of the meal, adjust the points downward proportionately. In any case, the maximum score for included vegetables is six points, reflecting the naturally diminishing benefits of adding further vegetables to a meal, however healthy they may be.

#2: Points for natural proteins – give the meal an additional two points if one serving of a natural protein is included. As before, two points is the maximum score for protein, regardless of how much is included. In this case, this limit reflects not only diminishing benefits from added proteins in a meal, but also the significant waste of natural resources and risks of health reduction from long-term excesses of protein foods in our diet. Please note that HumanaNatura defines natural protein foods, in rough order of desirability, as tree nuts and seeds, fish, poultry, lean meats, eggs, and dairy (while dairy is not strictly natural, it is an acceptable meat substitute if well-tolerated – and especially in the case of unsweetened yogurts).

#3: Points for raw fruit – give the meal an additional two points if it includes at least one serving of fruit, or if fruit is included after the meal as a dessert. Once again, two points is the maximum score for added fruit.

#4: Take-down for other foods – subtract two points for each serving of other foods that are included in the meal, such as grains or beans, but this time with no limit on the number of points that can be taken away.

#5: Special take-down for sweets – subtract four points for each serving of sweets, including sugary foods and beverages, that are part of the meal, regardless of the sugar source and again with no limit on the number of points that can be taken away.

As you can see, the maximum possible meal score with this OurPlate rating formula is 10. In practice, this score is most easily achieved via vegetable-rich and health-optimal Salad Meals and Steam Meals that follow the Natural Eating guidelines of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program.

Importantly, however, many modern meals will score well below 10, and even below zero, reflecting their potential to have strong negative health effects on us. As highlighted by the five-step OurPlate rating formula, this is especially true when meals include unhealthy and unnatural sweets and foods with added sugars.

For example, a meal of pasta with fatty meat, a small salad, and a sweet dessert would score -6 (-2-2+2-4). To use a less dramatic example, a veggie-rich salad meal with fruit that used an unnatural protein like soy would score a 6 (+6+2-2).

Explore OurPlate & Get Healthier!

In practice, HumanaNatura has found this simple approach to meal rating accurately reflects the overall quality of most meals, and is a great short-cut to quickly and reliably gauge the personal (and ecological) health impacts of the meals we eat each day. Note that the rating system doesn’t apply to snacks, but the overall OurPlate model does – favoring raw veggies and then fruits and natural proteins over other snack choices.

As you will quickly see, the OurPlate healthy eating model and HumanaNatura’s larger technique of Natural Eating form a powerful but flexible approach to modern eating. Using the OurPlate model, even for just a few weeks, you will soon find that HumanaNatura and OurPlate offer a simple, natural, and often profoundly health-transforming approach to our daily meals.

And as you achieve new personal health, fitness, and well-being from the HumanaNatura approach to eating, perhaps you will become interested in HumanaNatura’s other natural health techniques – Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities – which you can learn about at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Click to learn about OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s new healthy eating campaign!

OK, so HumanaNatura created and strongly favors OurPlate, and maybe this is not the best example of the U.S. government’s new MyPlate guidelines in action. But it is an actual photo of the recently unveiled approach being demonstrated by government officials. Wow! Anyone want a bite of this sort of scary and decidedly spartan MyPlate, instead of the HumanaNatura OurPlate example we have put up alongside it? And does anyone really think that this MyPlate prototype is nutritionally superior to our delicious and healthy-just-to-look-at HumanaNatura salad meal?

If you are thinking rematch, we would point out that even a world-class master chef using the government MyPlate guidelines is going to begin from a severe nutritional disadvantage relative to HumanaNatura’s OurPlate approach. Specifically, they will be forced to include unnatural and health-limiting foods like sugar and lectin-rich grains and cereals, carbo-bombs of cooked starches, hyper-allergenic beans and legumes, and a good helping of dairy products (which is fine if you are a newborn calf).

OurPlate is a simple but powerful model for optimal and natural daily eating amidst contemporary life. Integrating the science of our original human eating patterns in nature with modern nutritional and agricultural research findings, OurPlate produces meals that are easy to prepare, naturally delicious, extra-healthy, and ecologically friendly.

The OurPlate healthy eating model is derived directly from the crucial HumanaNatura health technique of Natural Eating, the first of four science-based natural health techniques that span and form the comprehensive HumanaNatura natural health system.

The model’s name, OurPlate, was chosen to contrast it with the U.S. government’s recently introduced MyPlate nutritional model. The names may seem similar, but the two sets of dietary recommendations are quite different – in underlying principles, emphasized eating practices, and expected personal and environmental health impact.

Notably, the governmental MyPlate model suggests only minor adjustments in the way people typically eat today – and thus in the way that food is typically produced and marketed – and its adoption can be expected to produce only incremental changes in our health levels, except in cases of people with very poor diets. By contrast, HumanaNatura’s OurPlate model proposes a substantially different, far simpler, more natural, and generally health-transforming approach to modern eating – even for people who have average and above average diets today.

As you can quickly see in practice, the OurPlate model is much more natural and beneficial for us, and quickly leads to superior and enduring personal health and fitness improvements. At the same time, OurPlate is better for the planet too, reducing stress on the earth’s varying ecosystems, preserving essential soils, and directly enabling sustainable and renaturalized agriculture around the world.

USDA MyPlate: New Model With Old Problems

If you don’t closely follow governmental food regulations, you may not know that MyPlate was introduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 2011 to replace its earlier food pyramid nutritional model – an approach that was used for a generation to summarize (and also significantly misconstrue) how modern people ideally should eat.

The U.S. MyPlate Model – Leftovers Mostly

The new look of the MyPlate model is more inviting and easier to remember than the old food pyramid. Unfortunately, its underlying guidance provides an only partial improvement, and only limited expected health improvements, compared with the outgoing pyramid model. MyPlate correctly eliminates sweets from a healthy diet, but still insufficiently re-greens our diets and continues to encourage excessive carbohydrate levels overall. It also fails to adequately differentiate between higher and lower quality proteins and fats. And MyPlate continues to allow patently unhealthy processed meats to forms a significant part of our daily diets.

As importantly, the USDA’s MyPlate model continues to advocate the practice of significant grain and bean or legume consumption, even as this is demonstrably less healthy for people and the environment. These negative health effects owe to the significant and historically unnatural carbohydrates and allergens in these foods, and their tandem harm to native soils and ecosystems when grown at scale. Overall, the USDA MyPlate model continues an unnatural outlook on human life and the foods we eat, and results in a less natural, health-impacting, science-leveraging, and optimal general set of dietary recommendations than is now possible.

HumanaNatura OurPlate…A Better Approach

To correct and highlight these crucial flaws in the USDA’s MyPlate approach, and in many other modern dietary models, HumanaNatura created OurPlate. As summarized above, Our Plate is a 100% science-based, renaturalized, and health-centered modern eating model. OurPlate is designed to make healthy natural eating a simple and enjoyable part of modern daily life. And OurPlate produces superior personal and environmental health outcomes, compared with MyPlate and many other contemporary nutritional programs.

With OurPlate, a broader range of available health and agricultural science is employed than is evident in the USDA’s MyPlate approach, and other popular diet programs today, leading to a superior, simpler, healthier, more natural, and more ecologically sound daily eating model.

> Green foundation – as you can see in the OurPlate icon (click here to enlarge), HumanaNatura’s model for optimal modern eating begins with a green foundation, both to optimize our long-evolved human diet in nature and reflect our best available science for healthy nutrition today. Because this vitamin, mineral, and fiber-rich green foundation is so important to our natural health, we recommend that at least half of our food volume each day be in the form of vegetables – including leafy greens, edible shoots and flowering plants, colorful vegetable-fruits, and root plants.

We also recommend: 1) prioritizing vegetables that can be eaten raw (a simple but powerful indicator the food likely has had a long natural place in our human diet), 2) avoiding unnatural (for humans) and ecologically damaging grains and beans, and 3) moderating our intake of starches. Overall, the HumanaNatura OurPlate model recommends a doubling of our daily vegetable intake relative to the USDA MyPlate model and, along with prioritizing the types of vegetables we eat, produces a diet that is far greener, more health-impacting, and more ecologically sound. And owing to its high fiber and reduced carbohydrate levels, OurPlate can even to allow us to consume fewer calories, with equal or greater enjoyment and satisfaction with our meals, helping both us and our planet.

In addition to its substantial green foundation, HumanaNatura’s OurPlate model then adds two (and just two) other food categories to provide a complete, natural, enjoyable, and sustainable modern nutritional model:

> Protein foods – long-evolved human foods providing health-essential proteins, oils and fats, vitamins, and minerals. Included in this category, in rough order of priority, are tree nuts and seeds, fish, poultry, lean meats, and eggs and dairy (while dairy is a newer human food, we view it as an acceptable meat substitute for people who tolerate it well, and emphasize unsweetened yogurts rather than naturally sugar-rich milks and high-fat cheeses). Importantly, in all cases, Our Plate and HumanaNatura recommend that our daily protein intake should not exceedrecommended levels, and preference should be given to sustainably harvested foods whenever possible (such as sustainably grown tree nuts, sustainably harvested fish, and 100% grass-fed meats).

> Raw fruits – sufficient to meet our remaining daily calorie needs (judged by our maintenance of a healthy body weight). When selecting fruits, preference should be given to low-sugar fruits, such as berries, and to fruits that are grown sustainably. And dried fruits should be avoided, due to their high sugar content and thus tendency – as with all sugary foods – to alter our natural blood chemistry and overall physiology, unnaturally stimulate our appetites and promote overeating, and lessen the appeal of less sweet but often far healthier foods – all reducing our long-term health and fitness.

In practice, the easiest and most enjoyable way to use HumanaNatura’s OurPlate model, and to quickly adopt and optimize this naturally complete and healthy way of eating, is to turn all our meals into Salad Meals or Steam Meals, examples of which are the subject of many of our NaturaLife posts.

For most of us, eating naturally the HumanaNatura way and using the OurPlate model will mean two or three salad-based or steamed meals a day, one or two of them with an animal protein, along with periodic snacking on raw veggies, fruits, and tree nuts and seeds.

As you will quickly see, the OurPlate healthy eating model and HumanaNatura’s larger technique of Natural Eating form a powerful and even revolutionary approach for modern eating today. Using the OurPlate model, even for just a few weeks, you will soon find that HumanaNatura and OurPlate offer a simple, natural, and often profoundly health-transforming approach to our daily meals.

And as you achieve new personal health, fitness, and well-being from the HumanaNatura approach to eating, perhaps you will become interested in HumanaNatura’s other natural health techniques – Natural Exercise, Natural Living, and Natural Communities – which you can learn about at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.